The Open Road

OK, I've been in New York all week, meeting with customers and partners. It gets a little lonely on the road.

Imagine my surprise when Skype introduced me to its newest feature: mail-order brides! At least, I think that's what this offer was....Is Skype psychic or what?

I knew my wife for six years or so before we got married. What a drag! With Skype I can just log in, get a wife, and log out again. Who knew the lengths to which technology would go to make our lives easier?!?

All Skype needs now is to add an option for "Marry anne_04_2003" and it's feature complete.

Skype wants to set me up on a date

For those who regularly use instant-messaging services like Yahoo Instant Messenger and Microsoft's MSN Messenger, you know that IM spam arrived long ago and shows no signs of leaving. Tuesday, however, I received my first Skype spam. Lucky me.

Unfortunately, I'm not alone. Skype spam is on the rise. It was just a matter of time, and I can't really complain, given all the value that I and my company derive from Skype.

However, the problem that I have with this spam business is that these dirty spammers keep confusing me with a mindless Windows sheep! (See right.)

Now, I can accept many things, but being confused with a Windows user? Unconscionable. :-)

More seriously, when are we going to start seeing spam filtering software and such, much like we have in spades for e-mail? Is there not enough corporate dollars in instant messaging to justify worrying about spam? Today, probably not, but that will likely change. Oracle, IBM, and others seem to think there's lots of money in collaboration tools.

This activity is all in corporate communication tools, but perhaps this will eventually lead to more protection of this sort of communication on the public chat networks, as well.

(Credit: Matt Asay)

At Alfresco, we've stumbled upon an ingenious way to keep the company together. We're highly distributed, with no US offices. With everyone working remotely, people can feel a bit isolated at times.

I read in Businessweek months ago about how IBM requires remote workers to congregate (online, over-the-phone, or in-person) every three days to improve happiness and productivity. In trying to figure out how to apply this practice to Alfresco, I thought of Skype.

Being a company with employees spread across the United States and Europe, Alfresco has long used Skype to cut phone costs and as our common instant messaging platform. But with a recent update from Skype, "public chats" have been enabled, giving us one more tool.

Basically, this means that we have group chat rooms that are always open. People come and go, participating or not. In so doing, the team has been knit together as we socialize over Skype and work over Skype.

We now have group chats for the management team, for the solutions engineering team, for support, and so on. Often these chats will rest silent, but when a good conversation gets moving, it's invaluable to team cohesion and productivity.

I suspect that it could help even in office environments where everyone sits near each other. I'd be interested to find out if it works as well for you as it has for us.

Vonage narrowed its loss this past quarter, but its customers are cutting their own losses with the struggling VOIP provider. I should know. I dumped Vonage two months ago and will never go back. Its service was terrible, both the customer support and the technology.

I'm with Comcast now for its Digital Voice offering and it's better (which is perhaps not surprising since Comcast intentionally hurts rival services on its network to preserve its own services). My problem now is that the Comcast VOIP boxes causes my wireless router to reset several times per day. Very, very aggravating.

The most surprising thing in all of this is how much better Skype is than either Vonage or Comcast Digital Voice.

I noted a few weeks ago that I was considering dropping Vonage for Skype. Today, I pulled the trigger. After several weeks with no Vonage, I've been much happier. Skype actually works most of the time. Vonage? Almost never (at least during this past year - it used to be much better).

So, today I canceled my Vonage account. So that I have a "real" phone service I also signed up for Comcast's Digital Voice service. I'll give that a spin for a few weeks to see if it's solid. If not, I'll dump it for Qwest (POTS line). I'll continue to use Skype for international calls (once or twice each day) and when convenient, which turns out to be quite often as I like keeping my phone/laptop tightly integrated.

Bye! Bye! Vonage!! I had a year or two of pleasant service from you, but far too many headaches this past year to continue shelling out $60-70/month. It might be Comcast's fault for throttling down my bandwidth used for Vonage, but guess what? I don't have the same problem with my Skype service.

eBay is planning to write down $1.4 billion in Skype-related charges, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Internet auction giant said the charges include $530 million to complete payments related to its 2005 acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype. The other roughly $900 million in charges reflect goodwill impairment due to "the updated long-term financial outlook for Skype."

This is too bad, since the Skype service has so much promise, and Skype could fit nicely with someone else. I never could understand the alleged synergies between the two, but now that I'm a happy Skype user, I hope eBay figures out where to put Skype, because it's really quite a good system (better than Vonage, I'm finding).

How about Skype + Cisco? Or Skype + Microsoft, for that matter? Or, really, Skype + anyone besides eBay? :-) Seriously, the deal was driven by hype - it was a case of eBay wanting to buy something hot to juice its then sagging sexiness. It didn't work, but eBay is chugging along, anyway.

(Credit: Skype)

Yes, you read the headline right. I have long been a critic of Skype, suggesting that eBay was foolish to buy the VoIP toy and generally ridiculing it as a serious business tool.

Today I'm eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I'm now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype.

When I first read the headline, I was shocked. I thought, "Wow! Skype runs on Windows servers???"

But no. Skype blamed its outage over the weekend on a different kind of Windows problem. It turns out that when you have millions of Windows machines restarting at the same time (getting their weekly doses of patches because, um, the system is rock-solid), it can cause all sorts of problems for others.

Like Skype. As reports The Register:

Could open source have saved Skype from its ongoing disaster? Andy Oram @ O'Reilly believes so, and I think he's onto something. Open source is not a panacea. But it does offer an alternative way to fix snafus like this that are wreaking havoc on Skpe's reputation, as Larry Dignan notes.

Andy writes: